The Octoroon Mistress

High on the steep gables of a Royal Street townhouse, a naked, olive-skinned ghost woman paces and trembles, but only on the most blustery of December nights. Or so legend says.

The Octoroon Mistress, as the apparition is known, was the courtesan of a wealthy Frenchman. Her bloodline - one-eighth Negro, seven-eighths white - begat her the racial title octoroon. Her real name was Julie.

Back in the days when New Orleans brimmed with Frenchmen and slaves, society's strictures made it all but impossible for a white man to marry a woman with even the smallest tendrils of African roots. So the Frenchman kept Julie - who, they say, was young and gorgeous - as his mistress; a willing sex slave, as it were.

Julie yearned to marry her European nobleman. He either declined or evaded the issue. Their relations soured. Desperate to prove her love, Julie spent a night on the rooftop of the four-story walkup at 734 Royal St., either at the Frenchman's behest, or of her own vehemence. It was a frigid and wet December night. When the Frenchman found her in the morning, Julie lay naked on the slick slate roof. She was dead.

These days, Julie's ghost seems to have abandoned the lonely rooftop. She now haunts a boutique and fortune-tellers' den called the Bottom of the Cup Tea Room, which occupies the ground floor of the crooked brick townhouse. The tea room's gaslit storefront sits below two wrought iron balconies that droop in front of shuttered windows. A tiny gabled window peeks from the fateful rooftop.

Inside the shop, professional psychic Otis Biggs pauses between readings to talk of his run-ins with the Octoroon Mistress.

"I was sitting in my booth and a woman's fingernails were going click, click on the table," says Biggs, 58, who drapes a silk-sleeved arm over the table and imitates Julie's drumming of her fingers.

Biggs says he's seen Julie's reflection in a tiny goldfish pond in the back courtyard. Julie's room, he says, was just above the pond, in the building's former slave quarters. Once, Cramer says, she and a friend named Lucy saw Julie's skirt pass in the rear courtyard.

"Lucy said, 'Look!' and we saw the skirt whisk around the back corner," says Cramer. "I said, 'What's that?' and Lucy said, 'That's Julie.' Just then we heard the giggle. Lucy said 'I'm out of here.' I said, 'I'm right behind you.' "